On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 10:49:56 +0100 Kjeldgaard Morten <mok at bioxray.au.dk>
wrote:
>On 23/01/2009, at 00.30, Nathan Handler wrote:
>>> For those of you who might be unaware, I have taken over Siegfried
>> Gevatter's (RainCT) role of REVU Coordinator. For the past few days, I
>> have been thinking about something, and I want to get the opinions of
>> the rest of the people in the community before taking any action.
>>... and kudos to you for taking on this task, Nathan!
>>I am not sure that more automated package analysis well help much. The
>uploaders already have Lintian and other tools at their disposal, yet
>the fact is that many packages have lots of Lintian issues remaining
>on the binary packages.
>>When people upload to REVU, they have read all the guides and
>tutorials (at least some have) and what they really want is a human
>being to look at it, and to get advice on what to do. Many see the
>warnings by the various tools, but simply don't know what to do about
>them. Or, they feel unsure on where to go and don't want to spend a
>lot of time going in the wrong direction.
>>The REAL problem with REVU is that not enough MOTUs care about it to
>enable us to keep up with the demand for reviews.
>>IF we want this interaction with the community, this way of meeting
>and training new developers, we really have to do more!
>>If we don't, we should consider closing down REVU. Personally, I don't
>think it's a good idea, but it is even worse having a queue of over a
>hundred packages where uploaders are waiting months between review
>cycles! That is detrimental to our standing respect in the community.
>The large number of packages in the "needs-work" section is also
>testiment to the number of uploaders who have given up, and every one
>of those is a potentially useful contibutor lost. Those still hopeful
>of getting their packages processed generally re-upload quite quickly,
>and so their package can wait for another month or two. This is BAD.
Agreed.
>As someone who has been doing lots of REVUs this cycle, it is quite
>depressing seeing that no matter how hard you work, the list keeps
>growing, and the packages you advocate do not attract a second advocate.
Thank you for this and I quite understand.
>As a temporary measure, to get rid of this long queue, perhaps we
>should only require one advocate for an upload? This is what Debian
>does, and I'd like to suggest a discussion of that on the next MOTU
>meeting.
>I do not think this is a good idea.
I think it's better in the short run if we all step up and do a bit and in
the long run if we figure a way to point new contributor more strongly
towards fixing what we already have.
Scott K
P.S. I'll sign up for doing a bit of it.